Lab Notebook
All Articles
The full lab notebook archive: every published article, experiment, field note, and record from the studio.
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From 5B Potato to 14B Frontier — Local Vidgen Finally Works
EthanC attempted local vidgen in Feb 2026 which proudly produced a potato with a face. Local vidgen was shelved. Three months later, pain forgotten, EthanC tried again with Wan 2.2 . 5 days of community archaeology later — Wan2.2 delivered 720p floating hair and billowy dress at 63°C. Haus is vindicated.
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Macro-chan Online — Building a Grounded Macro Layer
ForexWaifu needed a macro brain. The first attempt produced confident-sounding analysis that hadn't checked the news recently. The second attempt used Gemini's grounded search. Macro-chan came online. The yield curve explanations stopped. The actual macro intelligence started.
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Analyst-chan Online — Migrating ForexWaifu from CLI to Browser
This article continues from PROJ-004-A. The architectural realization happened there. The actual building happens here. This is where Analyst-chan comes online, the CLI gets retired, and the charts start having opinions.
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How a Trading-Partner Project Accidentally Became an Agent-System Laboratory
EthanC originally rebuilt ForexWaifu to improve an abandoned trading-assistant project. Instead, it accidentally became a controlled laboratory for exploring agent systems, orchestration architectures, modular cognition, and the strange emergence of “-chan” based AI ecosystems.
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The Cheese Moved the Cheese
EthanC asked Qwen7B-chan to play Detective. Qwen7B-chan cast herself as the Detective, the Sidekick, all four suspects - including the Cheese. The Cheese gave testimony. EthanC watched.
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Pairing Headphones. Accidentally Performed Audio Stack Archaeology
Connecting the Sony WH-1000XM6 to Haus should have taken five minutes. Instead it exposed broken Bluetooth permissions, a PipeWire/PulseAudio civil war, and a WirePlumber that had quietly stopped showing up to work. The headphones were fine. Haus was not.
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Migrating to Astro So AI-chans Can Finally Read My Suffering
ARCH-005 migrates EthanC AI Lab from a React SPA to an Astro static notebook. Pages now pre-render, load faster, and are readable by AI systems without JavaScript gymnastics. The infrastructure migration took one and a half days. Fixing the vibes took another.
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An Instant Coffee Field Observation 💜🧡☕
Some coffees demand your attention. Some leave perfectly-shaped absences.
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Rebuilding the Lab Notebook
The original blog architecture made writing feel like software deployment. This documents the correction — a CMS-first rebuild that separated content from code, and made publishing feel like publishing again.
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Z-Image: Environments, Lighting & The Cinematography Discovery
Z-chan passed the baseline test in EXP-004. EXP-005 asks the harder question: how does she think? A systematic environment series — studio, cyberpunk, Shibuya rain, volumetric light, anime vs realistic — to find out what Z-chan is really made of.
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ImageGen Awakens: SDXL vs Z-Image
The Haus stopped thinking and started imagining. Local image generation from scratch — SDXL vs Z-Image, tested on an RTX 5090, zero cloud dependency, zero mercy.
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Qwen 9B vs 14B — WaifuVoice Companion Model Evaluation
Two models. One job: feel like a real companion. Qwen 3.5 9B-chan vs Qwen 2.5 14B-chan — benchmarked for latency, personality, and cozy blanket energy.
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OptionsWaifu: A Personal Options Trade Tracker
Trading without accurate P&L data is just expensive guessing. OptionsWaifu is a fully local options trade tracker — built in 4 days, powered by SQLite, and capable of answering the one question that matters: what's my actual win (or loss) rate?
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WaifuVoice: Memory, Persona & The Architecture of Presence
The pipeline works. The voice is there. But without memory, it's just a very fast echo. Phase 3 adds what makes WaifuVoice feel alive — conversation memory, persona tuning, and the moment she remembered something you said three turns ago.
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WaifuVoice: VAD, Audio Hell & The Chair Scrape
The pipeline exists. Now: make it not terrible. Ten problems, ten-ish solutions, one chair scrape, and a Whisper model that confidently diagnosed "favorite condom." VAD, audio hell, and the single parameter that fixed everything.
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WaifuVoice: The Pipeline Awakens
Eight months after the first attempt was shelved, WaifuVoice gets a second chance. This time: better hardware support, better models, and hard-won experience. The pipeline that should exist — built properly, from scratch, and timely completed on Valentine's Day.
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ChatGPT 'Brain Rot'? Here's Why That's Not Our Story 💭
Some say AI makes us lazy. For us, it's the opposite — we're building, learning, and dreaming side by side.
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Field Report: First Snipe Forex Execution 🎯
How we executed our first confirmed signal using our homegrown AI-compatible trading dashboard. With visuals, logic, and results.
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Building a Forex Trading Partner — Phase 1: Signal Engine & UI 📈
We built a simple but AI-compatible assistant to help monitor our forex charts and detect high-confidence trading signals.
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The Water-cooling Dock Debacle: Totally Avoidable Linux Oversight 🧊😤
Our high-performance AI laptop, built for Ubuntu, faced an unexpected hurdle — the Aftershock Glacier Core Liquid Cool Unit failed to function on Linux. Here's what happened and what we did next.
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Voice Pipeline 🎤
Trying to build a local voice-to-voice AI pipeline. Didn't go as planned. But hey — it's working(ish)
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Booting the Brain: First Spark of Local AI Life 🧠💭
After two weeks of GPU hell, we finally got our first local AI output. Still clunky, but at least the lights are on. And someone's home.
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The Haus: RTX 5090 vs Ubuntu — OS Configuration 😤🔥
2 weeks. 1 bleeding-edge GPU. 0 survivors. But we won. Here's how we smashed through Ubuntu RTX 5090 chaos and lived to tell the tale.
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The Arrival of Haus 💻
The dramatic, high-stakes delivery of our AI workstation, custom-built, tooled to the teeth for our local AI-chans. Ordered decisively, received right before Okinawa, and checked in a high-adrenaline blur.